Examination of Witnesses (Questions 76-79)
ELECTRICITY ASSOCIATION
16 SEPTEMBER 2003
Q76 Chairman: Good morning, gentlemen,
we have already met Mr Cuttill, perhaps Mr Maclaren and Mr Symon
you would introduce yourselves?
Mr Symon: I am Robert Symon, I
am Chief Executive of Western Power Distribution, we look after
the distribution network in South Wales and the south of England.
Mr MacLaren: I am Robin MacLaren,
I am Chairman of the Electricity Association Networks Board and
also Managing Director of Scottish Power Transmission and Distribution.
As you may be aware the Electricity Association ceases to exist
on 30 September and will be replaced from the point of view of
distribution companies by an Energy Network Association and one
of the things I would ask you to assume is that there will be
continuity between what you hear today and the new arrangements.
Q77 Chairman: We are not going to
get any demob happy expressions of indiscretion! Back to our task,
I think you have both heard a lot of the discussion we have had
and some of the points may well have been covered exhaustively
by Mr Cuttill, moving on to you, as DNOs how confident are you
that you have a robust system for planning for possible emergencies
and also a system that would include estimates of both the effects
on the networks of different situations and the resources that
you need to deploy? In short, have you begun to learn lessons
and have you implemented these lessons of 11 months ago?
Mr MacLaren: Yes, I think we can
all speak for our own companies. As far as the Electricity Association
is concerned that is a trade association and what I would say
is that we have all been very focused over the last year looking
at emergency plans. Each company has independently written to
Government to assure them that their plans are in place for this
winter. We have coordinated activity to help us to tackle common
issues and to spread knowledge between the companies on lessons
learned by companies from storms last October and we are focused
on trying to disseminate information from experiences built up
over historical periods.
Q78 Chairman: Mr Symon if at any
time you want to supplement Mr Maclaren just indicate.
Mr Symon: The only thing I would
add to Robin is I cannot remember an event where so much focus
has actually been devoted to it. We had the BPI Report which brought
out some really good points and I think we have all learned from
them. We have also been trying to make commitments in terms of
the changes that we put into place. For example in my company
we have certainly refined the communications system that Paul
talked about and we are able to identify those customers from
their own telephone numbers, so we have actually taken it one
stage further. That information has been shared between us. I
think that there has been a moving on and quite rightly attention
has been focused on this event.
Q79 Linda Perham: Mr Symon, if I
can carry on with what you just said about customer communications.
Can you just list for us the main changes that have been made
by your DNO members to communication systems to make sure that
customers who are reporting faults or who want information are
better served than they were last autumn?
Mr Symon: I do not have the detail
for each individual company perhaps it would be better if I just
explained what my particular business has done. First of all we
have put in new high volt call-taking facilities. You have a choice,
you can either go with BT assembling all of this stuff or you
can actually bring it in-house, we have brought it in-house using
BT as a back-up, their call-taker system scheme behind it. What
we are able to do now is from a telephone number to identify a
customer and when a customer rings in we can say that we realise
that you are off supply, your postal code is PL9 9LA, or whatever
it happens to be, and if you wish to register as being off supply
press "one" on your telephone. We have been instituting
that in the South West over the last month or so and we believe
that has made a tremendous difference in terms of communication
with customers. The trouble with the general message is, does
the company know you are off supply or not? I think if you can
actually add that little bit extra then customers can be convinced
that actually you have the situation under control. What we are
after is that little piece of information that enables us to solve
the fault and there may be somebody else waiting in the queue
that has a piece of information that enables us to restore supplies.
As with Paul because the information backs up to our control system
we can feed back information immediately in terms of whether we
expect this fault to last one hour, two hours, three hours, four
hours or whatever it happens to be. That is one big change. The
other change is that we can hold the whole of our network on one
of these small palmtop computers and we can link that to GPS,
so if you type in a pole number the operator can actually be directed
straight to the pole involved and you can visualise that from
the point of view of interchanging staff, you make staff work
that much more effectively. All of these things have been communicated
and I am sure that we will all learn from each other, there are
also other good ideas that have been floated round.
Mr MacLaren: We run a similar
system to the one that Robert described. Following some severe
events in Scotland we have beefed up our system and have been
running on the basis that we do not want any of our customers
to receive an engaged tone. We have increased the capacity of
our call system—we did this a couple of years ago—to
take 250,000 calls an hour without any bottlenecks occurring,
we use messaging systems. We also try and move resources. We have
two locales and we operate a virtual call centre across that.
We use another telecom provider rather than BT. Each company has
its own individual approach. Paul has described what EDF are doing.
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